Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance

At Decision Analyst, quality assurance is a passion.

Decision Analyst’s commitment to the highest standards of professionalism, accuracy, and precision is absolute and uncompromising. Ensuring high-quality work is everyone’s responsibility.

Every project is carefully monitored for adherence to standards and specifications. Standardized systems and processes ensure accuracy and reliability. Error-trapping and quality-audit functions are built into all software systems.

Operations Departments and Client Service Teams use quality-assurance checklists to ensure that no detail is overlooked in the preparation of sampling plans, questionnaires, data files, cross-tabulation plans, tables, analyses, reports, and graphs. In addition, Operations Departments all adhere to quality-control processes within their own departments to provide redundancy. The goal is to ensure that several sets of eyes independently review each phase of every study.

Decision Analyst’s Quality Assurance Department not only establishes quality-assurance standards, systems, and processes, it also measures, monitors, and ensures accuracy throughout the life of each research and consulting project. Quality assurance performed in every phase of a study, as follows:

Questionnaire Review

Project "Walk-Through"

• A walk-through is a meeting of the Decision Analyst project team—one person from every department involved in a project. The goal is to ensure that everyone working on a project fully understands all the project details and responsibility assignments for each phase of project execution.
• The team performs a final review of all quota information, sample specifications, questions, answers, logic, and instructions before programming begins.
• Meeting attendees discuss threats and risks to the project so that additional attention and scrutiny can be focused on the high-risk parts of the study.

Survey Program Review

Once the questionnaire is finalized, programming the survey in Logician® begins. Once the survey is programmed, Quality Assurance conducts an exhaustive evaluation of the program’s accuracy, including the following:

Test Topline Review

After a survey program is approved by Quality Assurance, an Internet Programmer runs a program called "Survey Simulator." This program follows the logic in a survey and populates a topline with 100 artificial respondents, simulating actual respondent answers. Quality Assurance then reviews the topline cross-tabulation for the following:

Live Topline Review

After the first 12 hours of data collection (sooner if data collection goes quickly), Quality Assurance reviews data on the live topline for the following:

Codebook Review

Before the coding of open-ended questions begins, the codebook (a list of proposed codes) is reviewed.

• Grammar, punctuation, and spelling
• Consistency of code wording from question to question
• Code numbers (no duplicate codes, no two-digit code number in a three-digit field)
• Nets/Subnets containing relevant responses
• Correct indentation of supernet, net, subnet, and sub-subnet responses

Cross-Tabulation Review

Once the survey data is tabulated, the cross-tabulations are thoroughly reviewed by a second tabulation programmer for the following:

Report and Presentation Review

Review of Internal Standards and Training Manuals

The Quality Assurance Department is also responsible for ensuring all of the company's internal standards and training manuals are current. The department reviews these documents for the following:

Marketing Research Services

Decision Analyst is a leading international marketing research and analytical consulting firm. If you would like more information on our marketing research and analytical consulting services, please contact Jerry W. Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, by emailing him at jthomas@decisionanalyst.com, or by calling 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.